Why Jailbreak: Stack and Categories
by Adam Blair
May 24, 2009
Before jailbreaking, I had 9 home screens full of applications. 9 home screens! I am sure that you know just how confusing and crazy that many home screens can be. But, thankfully, jailbreaking has solved yet another problem. Not only has jailbreaking made my phone more customized, accessible, and easy-to-use, but it has also made my phone more organized.
There are two main utilities that I have used to reduce 9 home screens to a mere 2. Using only Stack and Categories (and a few smaller, subsequent apps that enable these to work) I was able to shrink 9 home screens down to less than one-third the size without deleting a single app.
The key to this entire organizational scheme is the utility Categories. It simply 'puts your applications into folders'. It is a little bit slow, but it gets the job done. It allows you to name your folders, easily add and remove apps from the folders, and select one of many icons to represent your folders. I have created folders through Categories specifically for my music apps, games, utilities, toys, and miscellaneous apps. Above, you can see my 'Games' folder, which contains multiple screens which you access through the familiar swipe method. I haven't put all of my apps into these folders; I have left my most-used apps on the home screen so they they are more accessible. The nicest thing about using Categories, is that now you aren't restricted to only 9 home screens of apps! If you are like me and love to load your phone up with all kinds of applications, I recommend getting categories so that you aren't restricted to Apple's limit of 9 home screens. This is the main utility used to shrink 9 home screens down to 2, but there are other utilities that help out as well.
Stack is a very handy utility which adds a special icon to the middle of your dock, as you can see in the above image. When clicking on this icon, it extends out to reveal 5 apps that are "stacked" on top of it. Indicated in the screenshot below, I have put all of my folders from Categories into Stack, but Stack will take whatever icons you add to it. In fact, it can take over 5, but then it extends from just a transparent strip to taking up the entire screen. Now, in order to use Stack, I had to make my dock a 5 icon dock and add a blank icon in the center of my dock. Also, it is necessary to go into BossPrefs and turn off the icons that you put ito Stack, unless you like duplicate icons for some strange reason.
As you can see, Stack and Categories have both immensely increased the amount of organization on my iPhone. By simply placing my less-used apps into folders and brushing those folders away into a collapsible "stack", I was able to turn 9 home screens into 2, with my most frequently used apps still readily available.
Get all of these required tools by adding the ModMyi, Saurik, and BossPref sources to Cydia.
